First Time Manager Tips

I could give you plenty first time manager tips, but….

would like to start with measure twice and cut once. I’m no carpenter nor am I handy at all around the house, but I can give you some tips for a first time manager. The first tip is You cant manage your business unless you measure it and that includes past, present and making future predictions. What to expect on this page:

PAST MEASURING

You need to know what you have spent and to who did it go to. You will probably use a P&L (profit and loss) sheet to do this tracking.

Some reasons for checking your P&L statements would include making sure you aren’t over spending, you have all the items you bought, you are actually being paid by customers on time and to keep theft down. You cant fight theft if you are unaware of it.

Present Measuring

A balance sheet is a snapshot of you business. This will tell you how much you have in assets ( such as vacuums or cash available), liabilities ( such as debt you owe for the vacuum) and equity ( Your investment or assists minus liabilities).

This snapshot of your business helps you understand the state of your business at the present moment or whenever the balance sheet was made. You can make one monthly, but I believe in the beginning quarterly will be just fine.

If you are up to the task I would suggest starting a cash flow statement as well. This will show how changes in your monthly or quarterly balance sheet accounts and income affect cash available. This can keep you out of trouble of not being able to pay your employees on time.

Future Measuring

In order to grow the business you need to know how much you will theoretically have. By combining the past and present measuring techniques you can forecast how much you will be making and how much you will be spending.

To do this you will need to look for the obvious patterns in your P&L sheets. As long as you have the same amount of contracts you should be able to predict how much you will need to spend to cover labor and supplies. By doing this you can plug in the numbers and determine a forecast.

If you find out that you are on a collision course of running out of cash in six months then you will need to pick up more contracts. If you like your predicted income you can keep the same amount of contracts you currently have or drop one if you need more free time for family. What matters is you wont know any of this if you don’t measure at all.

What we are aiming for

Checklist

I hated these things for some reason growing up, but have learned to love them. One of my mentors decided to give me a bunch of first time manager tips when I was working as an assistant manager.r Having checklist for just about everything I do I naturally turned to checklist to help my employees and myself.

They don’t have to be overly detailed, but as long as you have some system in place it will keep you and your staff from missing very important task. Nothing could be worse than accidentally forgetting to clean a building especially if a simple checklist could have prevented it.

Checklist could also help your MIC (manager in charge) with part of the hiring and training phase of your business. You just hand the new employee a checklist and ask them to finish everything on the list. Always trust, but verify. When they are done go check everything. Show them the correct standard if anything isn’t to your liking.

MONEY

Accounts receivable are your best friends in any business. This is a fancy way of saying the clients who owe you money. In the office cleaning industry your clients will likely like to pay you monthly instead of every time you show up. This is a big difference between commercial or residential cleaning.

The time of you getting paid matters because you will probably get a lump some of money during the month within a small time period. Unfortunately your accounts payable want their money and they want their money now.

Accounts payable could be any loans you take out to invest in your business if you so inclined. Also paying your employees would be a hefty expenditure. Supplies wont be that big of a deal after you get all of the big stuff if you plan on starting with little investment, but if you aren’t keeping up with your cash available you may spend more money than what you projected.

Delegating task

Working and running a business is two different things for sure, but at the start you might not be able to see the difference. To keep the cost of labor down you will need to work as many hours as you can. Depending on how large you want your company to grow this will have to change eventually.

You wont be able to finish all of your contracts at some point on any given night so you will have to delegate and train people to replace what you would normally do. You are going to need managers in charge. They should receive not only the training to clean the place, but learn how you check up after people to make sure they are cleaning to your standards.

On top of having MIC’s and other teams you may want to look into getting a personal assistant. This person can be in charge of all of the paper work that is required of this job. This hire will come later in the business when you can afford it, but will relieve you of office work like hiring papers, replying to prospects, and taking phone calls.

Having a college student for this position is ideal. It wont be that high paying of a job and the hours wont be regular until your business is large enough to pay for a basic 9-5 job just doing administrative work. Plus college students will like office administrator(I allow them to use this term for resume purposes, but don’t advertise the position when I want to have it filled) a lot better on their resume when they get out and look for a different job.

More First Time Manager Tips

The person you have most control over is yourself. Staying motivated and productive can be a challenge. This is especially if this is the first time you are working without managers and bosses over you. It’s real easy to lose focus and you must avoid this problem.

The best way to continue moving forward is to remind yourself what made you start in the first place. Was it the idea that you can provide your family a more financial stable life? Did you start so you can have an extra vacation a year? Whatever the source was make sure you use that and the previous first time manager tips to your advantage.

[starbox]Jan 16, 2017 @ 8:52 pm

Author: Bryan Collins

Hello,
I'm in my late 20's and I decided to look up how to make extra income one day to get my car fixed. Next thing you know I'm operating a couple small business and trying out new hobbies and enjoying life 10 times better. What can I say..... that transmission changed my life View all posts by Bryan Collins